President Donald Trump is engaged in a monumentally dangerous new phase in his battle against the ever-progressing Trump-Russia collusion investigation, a phase which the mainstream political media has so far missed badly.

At his West Virginia rally Thursday night, Trump issued a thinly veiled threat that his millions of supporters are counting on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation to go his way.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) noticed the new strategy on Friday morning, observing that Trump retweeted a much more explicit suggestion along the same lines:

The segment to which Lieu is referring features pro-Trump Fox Newser Judge Jeanine Pirro explicitly suggesting an “uprising” of Trump supporters if special counsel Robert Mueller's grand jury returns indictments:

“I’m sure this is on Donald’s mind, he never stops thinking. But at the same time, this is an agenda. And my concern is — if they end up with an indictment against a family member, just to get at Donald Trump because they couldn’t get at him, there is going to be a real uproar, a real uprising in this country.”

What makes this terrifying, rather than merely disturbing, is that this is not simply Trump going off half-cocked, this is a coordinated strategy to incite Trump supporters against the legitimacy of Mueller's eventual findings. Trump White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway laid out the same talking point earlier in that episode:

Lieu is absolutely right. Trump reeks of fear like an overturned truckload of Hai Karate, and the longer he holds on to power, the more difficult it will become to wrest it from him peacefully.

This is seriously alarming, and everyone involved, the mainstream political media included, needs to get the message out. We are a nation of laws, and no one is above them, not even people with an army of MAGA-hatted supporters behind them.